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Writing Hell: Curzio Malaparte & Vasily Grossman, bearing witness on opposite sides of the Eastern Front
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of NYRB Classics
Presented by The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU
& The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of The New School
Thursday October 29, 2009
Tishman Auditorium of the New School
66 West 12th Street
New York City
6:00 pm
Film screening of Frederick Wiseman’s “The Last Letter,” drawn from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
7:30 pm
Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, moderates a discussion with filmmaker Frederick Wiseman; film and sound editor, and translator of Malaparte stories, Walter Murch; author and former war correspondent Chris Hedges; Yale historian and New York Review of Books contributor Timothy Snyder; and Chair of Italian Studies at NYU, Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Writes Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics and publisher of its volumes Life and Fate and the forthcoming Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman; and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte:
The Eastern Front of the Second World War was arguably the crucial front in the war, and yet much of what went on there remains mysterious, under wraps even: a massively destructive confrontation between two equally, if differently, murderous forces of reaction and revolution. For Germans, events in the east were something to forget; for Russians, a point of pride: neither group, until recently at least, saw them as something to investigate. As to Western Europeans and Americans--they hadn’t been there, and politics kept them away for the duration of the Cold War.
But the reporters and writers (or writers and reporters, because the complicated relation between these two roles is one of the things we want to talk about) Vasily Grossman and Curzio Malaparte were there, the one reporting for the Red Star, the other for Corriere della Sera (the former’s reports eventually providing the basis for his novelistic masterpieces, Life and Fate and the posthumous Everything Flows; the latter’s resurfacing, transmogrified, into that magic realist avant-la-lettre feverdream of a chronicle, Kaputt—all three books recently reissued by NYRB Classics). Both had complicated relationships with the political authorities in their own countries and wrote under serious constraints, but both managed to bring the horror of war alive.
Grossman and Malaparte remain key witnesses to what happened in the east—writers who indeed discovered themselves as writers in the war--and yet as writers they could not be further apart. Grossman is a writer of the plain style; Malaparte one who is supremely, almost insolently, stylish. Grossman’s writing projects an air of calm, almost unquestionable moral authority. This happened, it says. Malaparte’s elegant take, by contrast, verges appallingly on the perverse; unignorable, he also seems thoroughly unreliable (not to mention, since he’s hanging around the entire while with the Nazi high command, distinctly disreputable). Did this happen? we wonder. Could it possibly have? Grossman, following the war and increasingly ever after progressively lost faith in the Revolution: only truth mattered. For Malaparte, truth was war's first casualty.
How does the writer make sense of the unendurable? Are there some things that do not bear telling, yet cannot not be told? Grossman and Malaparte have gained a new readership because their work speaks directly to the aesthetic and moral challenges that writers faced in the terrible twentieth-century and continue to face to this day.
ABOUT PARTICIPANTS
Frederick Wiseman, the eminent documentary filmmaker (Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare, and Meat, among many others) is in addition a great enthusiast of the work of Vasily Grossman. In 2000, at the Comedie Française in Paris, he adapted a, largely autobiographical, chapter from the latter’s Life and Fate, for the stage; the heart-wrenchingly lucid last letter of a Jewish doctor mother, who is writing from a ghetto in the Ukraine, falling under the thumb of the advancing Nazi armies, to her son, still safe in Moscow. Mr. Wiseman subsequently filmed the remarkable production, and that will be shown at 6pm (for more on the film, visit http://www.zipporah.com/films/3). And he will then join the panel that follows at 7:30pm.
Walter Murch, the celebrated sound and film editor (Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, etc.), author of In the Blink of an Eye and co-participant with Michael Ondaatje, in the volume, The Conversations, in one of his other lives has been rendering previously un-translated reportages by Malaparte into English, as poetry. He will sample some of those translations, specifically addressing the question of Malaparte’s lavish unreliability, during the panel.
Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, specializes in the political history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has recently been contributing a remarkable and much discussed series of essays on the Eastern Front, the fate of Belarus (“Caught between Hitler and Stalin”) and the so-called “Ignored Holocaust” to the New York Review of Books. Snyder’s books include The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003) and Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005).
Chris Hedges, recovering war correspondent (El Salvador, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq), current senior fellow at the Nation Institute, and author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002) and the just-released Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Illusion, a longtime enthusiast of both Grossman and Malaparte.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Chair of Italian Studies department at NYU, specializes in modern Italian film and culture, and fascism and the politics of memory (with books including Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-45, and Italian Films, Italian Histories: Colonialism, War, and the Legacies of Dictatorship), in both of which capacities she has of course steeped herself in Malaparte knowledge.
On Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt
Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote Kaputt, a terrifying report from the abyss, which became an international bestseller when it was published after the war. Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved. Kaputt is an insider's dispatch from the world of the enemy that is as hypnotically fascinating as it is disturbing.
On Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.
The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU was established in 1976 for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City--and between all of them and the city. It currently comprises 220 fellows. Throughout the year, the NYIH organizes numerous public events, including symposia, conferences, readings, and performances. For further information, please visit www.nyih.as.nyu.edu or call 212.998.2101.
The NYRB Classics series is designedly and determinedly exploratory and eclectic, a mix of fiction and non-fiction from different eras and times and of various sorts. The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. NYRB Classics are, to a large degree, discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.
For press inquiries, and to arrange interviews with participants, contact:
Stephanie Steiker, NYIH at NYU, 212.998.2101 or nyih.info@nyu.edu.
For press inquiries concerning NYRB books, contact:
Jenie Hederman, New York Review Books, 212.293.1641 or jhederman@nybooks.com
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